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Lev Navrozov Archive
Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Confucius, Sun Tzu, and 'The People’s Liberation Army'

Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.

Western university professors were so sure that every sage must have a Latin name that they transformed the name of the Chinese thinker Kung Fu Tzu (551-479 B.C.) into “Confucius.”

My Britannica says that he was a loner, and his teaching reminds me of Christ five centuries later. He devoted his life to relieving human beings of their sufferings and in particular, to avoiding war. As he said, “Virtue is to love human beings, and wisdom is to understand them.”

Kung Fu Tsu (Confucious) considered war an evil, but he realized that a just war could be inevitable. “The prime necessity for the success in such war is an army entirely clear as to why it is fighting and thoroughly convinced of the justice of its cause.”

Also In This Edition

The literature about Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese strategist, is vast. There are many translations into English of “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, and our New York Public Library issued to me its translation by John Minford, which looks like a kind of blank verse. According to my Britannica, Sun Tzu “probably lived in the early part of the 4th century B.C.” That is, he was a probable near contemporary of Confucius, but the impression is that they were denizens of different civilizations of different eras. Sun Tzu does not know any such notions as human suffering (at least someone else’s, not his own). Why on earth should anyone love human beings or understand them? What is just war versus unjust war? What is the justice of the cause? Why should an army be entirely clear as to why it is fighting?

Neither his army, nor Sun Tzu himself had the slightest interest as to whether any war was just or unjust. Why was his army fighting? Sun Tzu received an order from one of the five or six dictators who contested savagely for empire. The order was “Defeat A (or B, or C, or D, or another contestant for empire), for I (E) want “to roll up All-Under-Heaven like a mat and put the four seas into a bag.” Now, each of 5 or 6 dictators wanted to be the hegemon. Sun Tzu took orders from one of them. It would be ridiculous to imagine that he or his soldiers would question whether this would be a just or unjust war.

Sun Tzu’s army was a machine, out to destroy the enemy machine. Death and blood did not move Sun Tzu.

How does his machine work? In chapter 1 of “The Art of War” we read (p. 6):

    The Way of War is
    A Way of Deception.

    When able,
    Feign inability;

    When deploying troops,
    Appear not to be.

    When near,
    Appear far.

    When far,
    Appear near.

Only the last chapter, Ch. 13, entitled “Espionage,” contains the words “humanity” and “justice”—with respect to spies!

    In the whole army,
    None should be closer
    To the commander
    Than his spies,
    None more highly rewarded,
    None more confidentially treated.

    Without wisdom,
    It is impossible
    To employ spies.

    Without humanity [!] and justice [!]
    It is impossible
    To employ spies.

    Without subtlety and ingenuity,
    It is impossible
    To ascertain
    The truth of their reports.

    What about enemy spies?

    Enemy spies,
    Come to spy on us,
    Must be sought out,
    Bribed,
    Won over,
    Well accommodated.
    Then they can be
    Employed as
    Double agents.

    From the double agent
    We discover
    Local and internal spies.

    From the double agent
    We learn how best
    To convey misinformation
    To the enemy.

This is how “The Art of War” ends:

    Spies
    Are a key element
    In warfare.
    On them depends
    An army’s
    Every move.

“The Art of War” is the book of today’s “People’s Liberation Army” of the China dictatorship. I have bought an enthusiastic book about Sun Tzu in China’s bookstore in New York. Sun Tzu’s book is highly useful for the PLA methodologically as well. Whom Sun Tzu was to rout? Whomever he would be ordered to rout!

The PLA does not know whom it is to route either. It is to be ordered, and it is to rout the enemy, preferably without fighting, at a single strike. According to Columbia Encyclopedia (6th Edition), Sun Tzu said: “The best battle is the battle that is won without being fought.” He seemed to have predicted today’s super weapons (such as nano super weapons) being developed by the dictatorship of China. Here is a growing black cloud, consisting of billions of molecules, multiplying and destroying anything on their way to a goal ordered to each molecule, since each molecule is a nano (micromicroscopic) computer. The molecules will find and destroy any means of retaliation and will thus prevent Mutual Assured Destruction. Besides, those nano computers will not question whether the nano war they are to win is just or unjust, nor will they worry about death, blood, and suffering. Psychologically, they are the ideals of Sun Tzu’s army of 24 or so centuries ago.

In short, “the People’s Liberation Army” is getting ready, as Sun Tsu’s taught, for the dictator’s order. What about the West?

The democratic and constitutional West incorporates the thoughts and feelings of Confucius rather than Sun Tzu’s machine ruthlessness. The United States is a very young society, and only once did it fight an army like Hitler’s army and was not crushed because Hitler had decided to invade Poland and France and then to attack Stalin’s society, very much like his own, instead of developing nuclear weapons ahead of the United States. Hitler’s stupidity saved the democratic and constitutional West, in which France had been routed so “instantly” that even Sun Tzu would not have expected a quicker rout.

The best method to survive the democratic and constitutional West has found so far is to pretend that Sun Tzu’s China and “People’s Liberation Army” do not exist and to entertain itself for the past four years with the establishment in the oil rich Iraq of the Shia Islamic theocracy, similar to the Islamic theocracy in Afghanistan, where an oil pipeline is to run to the oil of the former Soviet “Middle Asia.” Well, don’t the commercials teach the Americans from morn to dusk that there is nothing in this life except the amassing of wealth? Pending the unmentioned nano death.

Is the “Iraq war” worth any discussion? First the Bushes went to live in the oil-rich Texas to with the bluntly stated, recorded and quoted intention to “get rich” (see Kitty Kelley, “The Family,” Doubleday, 2004, p. 101). After Texas, a worthy oil target was Iraq. But living in Iraq are Sunni, who have been waging a guerrilla war, which has been absorbing public attention in the USA for over four years, to the exclusion of China, a situation that would have enabled Sun Tzu to render his fatal blow at the United States entirely unexpected.


Lev Navrozov can be reached by e-mail at navlev@cloud9.net.

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